A crossover trial fed people raw vegetable salad with fat-free dressing. The researchers measured zero carotenoid absorption. Nothing appeared in the blood.
Same salad, same vegetables, full-fat dressing: meaningful absorption. The threshold was 6 grams of fat, and below that line, raw vegetables delivered nothing the body could use.
It redefines what no-cook actually means. Without heat, you lose every route that depends on temperature: no stir-frying to release glucosinolates, no simmering to crack open the tomato matrix, no roasting to concentrate flavor compounds. Everything arrives as-is, and the pairing becomes the entire delivery mechanism.
Olive oil on a carrot salad is not flavor. It is the threshold between zero and full beta-carotene absorption. Avocado sharing a plate with raw tomato puts fat next to lycopene, and the body cannot pull lycopene without it.
172 recipes, median 5 minutes, median 5 ingredients. Half hit EFSA high-protein thresholds without a stove. The protein comes from yogurt and cottage cheese, dairy sources that score the same digestibility grade as cooked steak.
104 vegetarian, 86 gluten-free. Sixty percent are snacks, forty-nine percent work as lunch, and exactly 3 qualify as dinner.
Twenty-five of the fifty-one salads pair raw vegetables with a verified fat source, the specific combinations where crossover trials measured the difference between zero and full absorption.